Are you an expert in the academic twitter game?

If you are not yet an expert in the academic twitter game, have a read!

Last week, when I was at a conference in Belgium, I listened to a talk about “why to use twitter”. When I talked to colleagues, they told me that they either do not have a twitter account, or never use it to post something. To be honest, I am also not (yet) a very active twitter user. However, we all should be. In this blog, I will show you WHY you should use twitter as a scientist and HOW you can use twitter.

Networking

When you follow (and are followed back by) other researchers either from your own university or across the world, it will be so much more easier to make contact at a conference or by sliding into their DMs. Some time ago, I replied to a tweet about a colleague whom I never met in real life. He sent me a message thanking for my kind tweet and we got to talk about our research interest, attendance at a conference in the summer and even possibilities in the future to work together.

Academic reputation

The feeling of publishing a paper is great, after so much work and possibly revisions. However, not a lot of people read your paper (if it is not some ground breaking finding). By using twitter, you can share blogposts explaining your research, share your paper, important figures and so on. As soon as your research catches the attention of fellow researchers and colleagues, it is also more likely to be featured in the press or at conferences. Added benefit: people will get to know you as a researcher and are more likely to get into contact for future collaborations.

The brain of many

Do you need to find a good questionnaire about a certain topic? Or are you looking for datasets that you might use in your next project? Ask for it on twitter. If your followers don’t know, they can easily retweet and you will reach a huge audience without any effort. Also, scanning through the tweets of others will often provide you with new insights, new research ideas and often also new job opportunities. Just scrolling through my twitter page, I already have seen 4 or 5 postdoc positions I found extremely interesting (just a pity that I am not finished yet to apply for those positions).

The How-to:

If I convinced you to use twitter, now is the time to take the next steps.

1. Sign up! Choose a username that is close to your actual name as it makes it much easier for other researchers to find you and follow you.

2. Your profile: Upload a profile picture so others know that it is you and not a bot. Also upload a nice header (often used: previous publications or a photo while giving a talk at a conference). Share a short description of your research interests. Also, add your website link if you have a website

3. Follow other people: you can find interesting researchers by searching for specific keywords (e.g. parenting). You will see all users that use this word in their bio. Also, there is a “Who to follow” box on twitter giving mostly good recommendations.

4. Tweet: tweet about whatever you want, it also does not have to be purely scientific. You can tweet pictures, GIFs, video, text, emojis, links or all of the above. You can also tag other twitter users (co-authors for example).

5. Interacting with others: You can like tweets of others, you can re-tweet tweets (with or without a comment) and you can reply to tweets. For a more private conversation, you can send direct messages to other twitter users.

6. Are you ready for advancing your twitter game? Check out Twitter for Scientists by Dan Quintana (https://t4scientists.com/)

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me!

The M-thesis studio to support students

We set up a Master thesis studio for master students in Pedagogical Sciences at the VU Amsterdam

As a supervisor to students who write their theses, you often get a lot of e-mails from students, like “The assumptions of doing an ANOVA are violated, what do I have to do now?” or “You asked whether my study has enough power, but how do I do a power analysis?”. If you have supervised students for many years, it is likely that you receive these questions almost every year. It takes a lot of time answering these questions and ideally, students are encouraged to find answers to these questions by themselves using information from earlier in the curriculum.

The problem

In the Master program pedagogical sciences, we felt that many students were insecure about writing their master thesis which resulted in a lot of questions and supervision time for their supervisors. Questions were often the same across students, supervisors and even academic years. We were searching for a sustainable solution making the supervision process more efficient.

Our solution

We designed a program called “Master thesis studio”: These were monthly, online sessions in which we give support to the students and gave supervisors the opportunity to answer questions in a group setting.

The parts of the sessions were:

1. A plenary session of around 40 minutes. A lecturer gave a short, interactive presentation about a topic of the thesis process, such as academic writing or data analysis. There was room for questions from and interaction with the students. This part was also recorded and recordings were made available to students, so that students could watch it back whenever they needed to.

2. A peer session of around 20 minutes. In break-out rooms, students got to work together on some aspect of their thesis, for example conducting a power analysis, and they were instructed to give feedback to each other. They could exchange tips and tricks and profit from each other’s knowledge.

3. A session with the supervisor of around 20 minutes. The supervisor could use this time to meet with all of his or her students to give general feedback to all of them. Also, students could ask questions and feedback from the supervisor.

Lessons learnt

The sessions were very well attended. Using recordings, we provided students with the possibility to also profit from the sessions afterwards. Some supervisors made use of our sessions for group supervision and Q&A’s. When students gave feedback to each other’s work, we already saw in some theses improved quality. However, students were reluctant to use the peer sessions independently to give each other feedback and exchange experiences. They needed concrete tasks and visible incentives to see the advantage. Supervisors also not always made use of the sessions due to lack of time or other reasons. Also, timing of the topics was not always aligned with the progress of the thesis. Next year, we want to align the sessions better to the progress of the thesis writing. Moreover, we want to teach the students the advantages of giving peer feedback and we also want to advertise the Master thesis studio to supervisors, so that they can profit from it. We ended this academic year with evaluation forms for students and supervisors to learn from their experience and improve the Master thesis studio next year.

Questions?

If you have any questions about or suggestions for the Master thesis studio: please get in contact. We appreciate feedback from supervisors and students (from any university) alike and want the Master thesis studio to be an advantage for everyone.